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Dabkowski_Dissertation_071918.pdf (7.75 MB)

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Variable Vowel Reduction in Mexico City Spanish

Dabkowski, Meghan Frances
http://orcid.org/0000-0002-8354-872X
http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1531994893143203

Abstract Details

2018, Doctor of Philosophy, Ohio State University, Spanish and Portuguese.
This dissertation focuses on variable vowel reduction in Mexico City Spanish, a salient feature of the pronunciation of this dialect in which a word like tomates “tomatoes” may be variably realized with a shortened, voiceless, or weakened final vowel. My research builds on studies of vowel reduction in other languages and varieties, and places Mexican Spanish within the typology of languages and varieties that variably reduce vowels in this way. My investigation of the phenomenon is the first to examine acoustic data to (i) understand the acoustic properties of these reduced vowels, (ii) describe and categorize them, and (iii) analyze their patterning with regard to linguistic and social factors. To investigate this issue, I conducted fieldwork onsite in Mexico City in 2015 and 2016, and recorded speech samples with 73 native speakers, women and men from diverse socioeconomic backgrounds, between the ages of 21 and 81. The recordings include a sociolinguistic interview designed to elicit spontaneous informal conversational speech. Approximately 160 vowel tokens were acoustically analyzed for each of 40 of those participants using Praat (Boersma & Weenink 2016). For all vowels not adjacent to another vowel or glide, I measured the segment duration as well as the duration of full modal voicing within the segment, for a total of 6,504 tokens. Along with the results from the acoustic analysis, each token was coded for target vowel, surrounding segmental context, stress, position relative to lexical stress, syllable type, word position, speaker age, gender, and socioeconomic status, in order to execute statistical models that test the relationships between linguistic and social factors and vowel reduction. My findings from the acoustic analysis indicate that various types of reduction in the articulation of vowels occur, including a range of voice weakening, including devoicing, and weakened/breathy voicing, as well as extreme shortening. The findings from the inferential statistical analyses indicate that stress, position relative to stress, preceding and following contexts, and target vowel all contribute to the likelihood of a vowel’s reduction, while the social factors examined here do not. Voice weakening affects all vowels at relatively similar rates, and is conditioned by preceding voiceless consonants, following voiceless consonants, and following pauses, and is most frequent in post-tonic position. Shortening affects all vowels except /a/ and is conditioned by preceding and following voiceless consonants, and following pauses, and is most frequent in pre-tonic position and unstressed monosyllabic words. I argue that these results for linguistic factors support an articulatory model of speech in which the relative timing of articulatory gestures results in their overlapping, and voice weakening or extreme shortening are the consequence. The findings regarding social factors suggest that the vowel reduction observed in this variety is a case of stable variation, rather than a change in progress. A major contribution of this research is the understanding of voice weakening and shortening as two complementary strategies that both contribute to vowel reduction in this variety by targeting different prosodic positions.
Rebeka Campos-Astorkiza (Advisor)
Terrell Morgan (Committee Member)
Fernando Martínez-Gil (Committee Member)
262 p.
Linguistics
Mexican Spanish, phonetics, sociophonetics, phonology, linguistic variation

Recommended Citations

Citations

  • Dabkowski, M. F. (2018). Variable Vowel Reduction in Mexico City Spanish [Doctoral dissertation, Ohio State University]. OhioLINK Electronic Theses and Dissertations Center. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1531994893143203

    APA Style (7th edition)

  • Dabkowski, Meghan. Variable Vowel Reduction in Mexico City Spanish. 2018. Ohio State University, Doctoral dissertation. OhioLINK Electronic Theses and Dissertations Center, http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1531994893143203.

    MLA Style (8th edition)

  • Dabkowski, Meghan. "Variable Vowel Reduction in Mexico City Spanish." Doctoral dissertation, Ohio State University, 2018. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1531994893143203

    Chicago Manual of Style (17th edition)

osu1531994893143203
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This open access ETD is published by The Ohio State University and OhioLINK.